As the Pope recovers, his assailant remains a mystery
His first normal meal consisted of consommé and a boiled, mashed pear, and the next day he tackled a bowl of stracciatella, a hot chicken broth with egg drops. There were clear signs last week that Pope John Paul II was on his way to recovery—and, as usual with any job he tackled, doing it robustly. Doctors at Rome's Agostino Gemelli Polyclinic removed the 26 stitches they had inserted after a would-be assassin's bullet ripped through the Pope's abdomen on May 13. The Pontiff received visitors, made brief voyages to a nearby armchair and walked in the corridor outside the tenth-floor four-room suite, where he had been moved from the hospital's intensive-care unit.
Typically, John Paul was thinking of others. He ordered flowers sent to the two American tourists, Rose Hall and Ann Odre, who had been shot with him in that appalling moment in St. Peter's Square. When a group of 52 schoolchildren gathered below to serenade him with a folk song and offer prayers for his speedy recovery, the Pope sent a messenger bustling down with a fond reply: "I bless you, and I would like to kiss you all, one by one." John Paul even celebrated a birthday; he was an increasingly hearty, if not yet hale, 61.
Doctors warned that the accelerated pace of the Pope's recovery did not mean the end of his ordeal. John Paul faces a second major operation in approximately a month to reconnect his large intestine, which was surgically isolated to help cut the risk of infection. But a team of six doctors from five countries (two from the U.S., one each from France, Poland, Spain and West Germany) pronounced him to be recovering nicely so far. Early last week the Pope was moved to say, after sipping tea laced with sugar, "Per la prima volta, mi sento bene" (For the first time, I feel well).
Though the Pope was impaired, business at the rigidly hierarchical Vatican moved on, intruding on the patient as discreetly as possible. John Paul met six times with Agostino Cardinal Casaroli, the Vatican Secretary of State, and was told of the defeat of a referendum proposal backed by the Pope that would have restricted abortions. He also received a surprise visit from Franciszek Cardinal Macharski, the Archbishop of Cracow and an old personal friend, who brought "the greetings of the people of Poland."
Meanwhile, about 3½ miles away, Italian police were still trying to make sense out of the bizarre maunderings of Mehmet Ali Agca, the gaunt and hollow-eyed Turkish gunman who felled John Paul in what he termed a "protest against the imperialism of the Soviet Union and the United States." The terrorist told interrogators that he had first wanted to kill the "King of England" as well as the President of the European Parliament. He said he changed his mind after discovering that Britain was ruled by Queen Elizabeth II and the Europarliamentary President was a woman, Simone Veil. Agca told police that "as a Turk and a Muslim," he would not kill a woman.